The Project on Gender, Culture, Religion, and the Law was initiated by a grant from Sylvia Neil and Dan Fischel. The project was launched in February 2007 as part of the celebrations to mark the 10th anniversary of the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute.

Our Mission

The mission of the Project is to identify ways of working through conflicts between women’s rights and religious law.  Throughout the world, tensions between women’s equality claims and practices justified in terms of traditional cultural and religious norms present pressing challenges for  theorists, lawyers, activists and policy makers.

Controversies often occur where religious or cultural practices intersect with public life.  They may involve wearing religious attire to school or in court or appealing to cultural values as justification for breaching general laws.   Many disputes arise where public family law norms come into conflict with religious traditions regarding the regulation of family life. When the marital family is created, disputes occur over the appropriate age for marriage, the right to choose one’s own spouse and whether to enter into a polygamous marriage. During the course of marriage, controversy may focus on childrearing practices, such initiation rituals, the scope of girls’ educational opportunities, concerns for family honor or the use of violence against women and children in the family.  Conflict also emerges at the end of marriage, over women’s entitlements to seek a divorce under religious law, their rights to maintenance and a share of family property and their rights to custody of their children.

The urgency of these conflicts has made them the subject of research in a number of disciplines. Political philosophers have asked what the nature and  limits of multicultural accommodation should be.  Lawyers have sought to identify the extent to which the state can constitutionally engage with religious and cultural communities.  Social scientists have inquired into the sorts of interventions into discriminatory practices that might create the most pervasive and effective change. Activists in these communities analyze theoretical models and their own experiences in order to learn from successes and failures.

There is a need for dialogue amongst these constituencies to allow them to share knowledge across disciplines and to learn from the struggles of women in diverse cultural and religious contexts. The Hadassah-Brandeis Institute Project on Gender, Culture, Religion and the Law will support this dialogue through the creation of  public forums for the exchange of ideas and the publication of research that bridges these disciplinary and cultural fault lines.